Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 185discoverer of a dark continent—the unconscious—of which little had been
known about prior to his singular efforts. For instance, Myers and Dewall’s
(2018) textbook showcases a portrait of Freud with the following caption
underneath: “I was the only worker in a new field” (p. 462). In fact, this
claim is at best a strategic hyperbole on Freud’s part. The concept of an
unconscious aspect of the mind was indeed a veritable trope in 19th century
Europe that, as Dumont (2010) notes, was widely investigated via
experimental studies, philosophies of nature, and clinical psychological
research (p. 84). Notably, what distinguished the 19th century view of the
unconscious from its earlier figurations was the new conceptualization that
the unconscious was not principally an immaterial spiritual dimension but
rather a natural aspect of the human mind that could be a proper ‘object’
for scientific investigation, even if it could not be directly observed. Thus,
for example, Dumont (2010) notes that in the first half of the 1800’s,
Johann Friedrich Herbart attempted a mathematization of unconscious
mental processes and even developed a theory of the unconscious
strikingly similar to Freud’s own in which “ideas struggle with one another
for access to consciousness, as dissonant ideas repel one another and
associated ideas help pull each other into consciousness or drag each other
down into the unconscious” (p. 84). With regard to the philosophical
tradition, Freud’s concept of the unconscious has an unmistakable
resonance with Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will as a “blind
driving force, essentially irrational and thoroughly imbued with sexual
energy.” (Dumont, 2010, p. 86). As such, Freud’s ideas about the
unconscious should be more explicitly situated within the background of
an emerging scientific interest in studying unconscious mental processes
that was occurring in 19th century Europe.
Freud’s vision of personality is inextricably tied with his efforts to
understand and treat psychopathology. For Freud, at the root of
psychopathology, and thus of personality, is psychical conflict. In so far as
psychoanalysis seeks to change the nature of psychical conflict, it might
also be said to be interested in changing the dynamics of personality. Over
the course of his theorizing, Freud provided two major models of the
psyche—the topographical and the structural models—to conceptualize the